Purpose

Emerging economies have to address positive challenges such as sustainability, digitalization, entrepreneurial readiness and planning and behavioral strategies and negative challenges, such as corruption and bureaucracy. The COVID-19 pandemic hit all economies and arguably made hotel businesses that are from less typical emerging economies, such as the Czech Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), to deal with similar challenges to that of their counterparts from typical emerging economies. How do Czech hotel SMEs address the COVID-19 challenges and what sustainability message can be extracted from that with the relevance for not only businesses from emerging economies? The purpose of this paper is to explore how Czech hotel SMEs address the COVID-19 challenges and what sustainability.

Design/methodology/approach

A consolidated parsing of the literature, legislative and analytical framework, along with an investigative case study of 11 Czech hotel SMEs was performed, based on the questionnaire survey and semi-structured in-depth direct interviews. The holistic thematic analysis processed this fresh data and allowed Socratic questioning and glossing while addressing both research questions.

Findings

The performed case study reveals that typical challenges faced by entrepreneurs in emerging economies became, via COVID-19, universal challenges, these challenges are a valuable impulse for digitalization and changes of entrepreneurial strategies, but not so much for sustainability, and the omnipresent negative impact of corruption and bureaucracy.

Originality/value

This paper presents a pioneering study regarding the addressing COVID-19 and sustainability concerns by SMEs in a less typical emerging economy and offering a universal, partially comparative and sadly not so sustainable, message which is not just limited to emerging economies.

中文翻译：

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应对酒店业中小企业面临的 COVID-19 挑战——捷克对新兴经济体的可持续发展信息

目的

新兴经济体必须应对可持续发展、数字化、创业准备、规划和行为策略等积极挑战以及腐败和官僚主义等消极挑战。COVID-19 大流行袭击了所有经济体，可以说使来自不太典型的新兴经济体（例如捷克中小企业）的酒店企业应对与来自典型新兴经济体的同行类似的挑战。捷克酒店中小型企业如何应对 COVID-19 挑战，以及从中可以提取哪些可持续发展信息，不仅与新兴经济体的企业相关？本文旨在探讨捷克酒店中小企业如何应对 COVID-19 挑战以及可持续性。

设计/方法/方法

基于问卷调查和半结构化的深度直接访谈，对文献、立法和分析框架进行了综合解析，并对 11 家捷克酒店中小企业进行了调查性案例研究。整体主题分析处理了这些新数据，并允许苏格拉底式提问和解释，同时解决两个研究问题。

发现

所进行的案例研究表明，新兴经济体企业家面临的典型挑战通过 COVID-19 变成了普遍挑战，这些挑战是数字化和创业战略变革的宝贵推动力，但对可持续性和无所不在的负面影响影响不大腐败和官僚主义。

原创性/价值

本文提出了一项开创性研究，涉及在不太典型的新兴经济体中解决中小企业对 COVID-19 和可持续性问题的关注，并提供了一个普遍的、部分比较的、可悲的是不那么可持续的信息，不仅限于新兴经济体。